Sri Lanka at the crossroads of history / edited by Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern.
Sri Lanka at the crossroads of history edited by Zolt�an Biedermann and Alan Strathern.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Biedermann, Zoltán.

Strathern, Alan, 1975-

Biedermann, Zolt�an, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Arts.

Commerce.

Sri Lanka--History.

Sri Lanka.

History.

Sri Lanka--Civilization.

Civilization.

Sri Lanka--Commerce.

Arts--Sri Lanka.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xiii, 340 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London : UCL Press, 2017.

Summary:

The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a 'crossroads', a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean. Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.

Contents:

Introduction: Querying the cosmopolitan in Sri Lankan and Indian Ocean history

1. Archaeology and cosmpolitanism in early historic and medieval Sri Lanka

2. 'Implict cosmopolitanism' and the commercial role of ancient Lanka

3. A Pāli cosmopolis? Sri Lanka and the Theravāda Buddhist ecumene, c. 500-1500

4. Beautifully moral: cosmopolitan issues in medieval Pāli literary theory

5. Sinhala sandēśa poetry in a cosmopolitan context

6. The local and the global: the multiple visual worlds of ivory carvers in early modern Sri Lanka

7. Cosmopolitan converts: the politics of Lankan exile in the Portuguese Empire

8. Between the Portuguese and the Nayakas: the many faces of the Kandyan Kingdom, 1591-1765

9. Through the lens of slavery: Dutch Sri Lanka in the eighteenth century

10. Cosmopolitanism and indigeneity in four violent years: the fall of the kingdom of Kandy and the Great Rebellion revisited

11. The digestion of the foreign in Lankan history, c. 500-1818.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1911307835

9781911307839

1911307843

9781911307846

OCLC:

989712750